


Drunk on the Taste of Your Lips.

by fearless_seas



Series: Halemadge || Pythias & Damon [7]
Category: 18th Century CE RPF, American History RPF, American Revolution RPF
Genre: Comfort, Crying, Emotional, Loss of a Lover, M/M, Memories, Past Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-11
Updated: 2017-02-11
Packaged: 2018-09-23 10:51:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9652745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fearless_seas/pseuds/fearless_seas
Summary: The night before John Andre's execution, he finds solace in learning of Benjamin Tallmadge's broken heart.





	

**Author's Note:**

> I accidentally posted this last night when I meant to draft it. It was published accidentally without edits. Please- if you already read it before I had the chance to delete it, could you please re-read it? I worked hard. 
> 
> But here, a lot of tears went into this.

_October 1st,_ 1780.

______________________

 

          Benjamin Tallmadge did not see the drawing until the prisoner lifted it up to him from where he sat. The prisoner set the charcoal stick down on the table, the ash leaving creases of his fingerprints and smudges across the paper. He wouldn’t admit he recognized who it was at first. There was a horse with a mane of blonde, somehow, although there was not color to the art, Benjamin recognized the light shading. Every hair was in place and his eyes caught on to the gentleman riding the mare. The man’s hands were tied behind his back and strands of rope hung off under the rawing of his wrists. As Ben stood there, underneath the wrap of his collar he began to sweat but he did not raise a finger to loosen the buttons around his neck. He shuddered, mind hammering to the notice of the familiar facial features. The same as the prisoner he was guarding at the desk.

          John Andre let out a chuckle, “Quite a comical parade, is it not?”. The second guard at his right, Lieutenant-Colonel Alexander Hamilton, did not smile in reply, and neither did Ben. Silence perpetrated the room. A stranger fear pierced through him as though the cutting of a knife. It was the state of tension between love of natural beauty and the consternation of natural meaningless or absurdity. It was not surprising when the guilty verdict rang out across the courtroom, and it was not astonishing when there was a pang of guilt that riveted throughout his chest. Tomorrow was the day, his life will hang as an unfinished sentence with a dismal comma sliced after the words. He could be thirty-one next year, he gambled with dice on what mattered most and lost. Out the corner of his view, the edges of Hamilton’s rose lips were screwed up, tight with pity. Ben’s ear twitched and he diverted his secret glance, the constriction in his shoulders building and he shifted footing.

          He could feel his eyes water and he blinked rapidly to mask it; _what use would it be?_   Would his tears somehow change the jury's verdict? Would his pain somehow steal from Andre’s death? He will rendezvous with death at some disputed barricade. A silhouette of life’s shattered dreams, broken hearts and tearful streams. Ben was always too sensitive, overthinking every little piece--at least that's what he was once told. His mother always told him that there were no nightmares underneath his bed, they were all inside his head. Somehow, with every bed time story, the wisps of his mother’s resemblance to himself told him stories of beautiful girls he would one day marry. Her lips failed to mention to him the boys with sunshine trapped in their hair, skies in their eyes, and a laugh that seemed to stop time itself. He would trade every one of his joyous memories for one last moment with that boy.

           _Nathan Hale._

           The hands behind his back revolved to fists and he firmed up his mouth, teeth biting hard at the flesh of his inner lip. Nails cut into the skin of his hands, leaving markings on his palms. He nicitated furiously and a set his jaw stiff. Andre lowered the drawing, a low sigh blowing past his lips as he set it back on the desk, leaning his head on his hand and watching the rebels guarding him. They did not look like “rebels” to Andre, they looked like boys. Andre trailed the scarlet freckles prickling across Hamilton’s cheeks and his own eyelids brimmed, swimming tears across the whites of his eyes. His heart throbbed, a part of him willing for the tears, yearned for angry nails in his hair while he is gasping for air; but all he could manage to do was swallow the lump in his throat and that was more of a punishment then ever a relief. _Was he too strong, or too weak?_

         “I want you both to know how much I appreciate your kindness”, words escaping him. Ben heard his silver tongue at work, lyrics of gold slipping out of his mouth. When the world perishes, and all things cease to exist, nobody will be left to remember the flame or the embered legacies that were charred. From the gallows Andre will remain in every stroke of a paintbrush and ink stains, every note from every song. “Everyone has treated me with respect--”, he paused and Ben’s stomach began to tremble with butterflies hatching in the pit. Andre turned his chair, facing the center space between the two men. “But you two-” his finger fluttered from his wrist, and caught Ben’s sight, “-have been especially kind.”

          There was a space that lingered between the dialect and Hamilton’s hand brushed against Ben’s thigh where they stood. Roses wear blindfolds, violets crack whips, and candle wax dripped on the surface of the table where Andre leaned forward biting his lip. “I have one more kindness to ask of you, if I may?” Ben did not move, but from his right side, Hamilton inclined his head to a nod, his shadow catching across the candle light and illuminating satisfying figures of gloom in the flame and wicker. “General Clinton has been especially well to myself", the prisoner continued, "May I be permitted to write a letter to him? I want to be sure he knows I hold him blameless for my fate.” There was a restrained glint of condolence that flashed across the glassy gaze of his glimpse as it tumbled to the floor. “I went against his order and every step brought me here. I would not, for the world, wish to leave a sting in his mind that would embitter his future days.”

           There was a shudder before the Englishman’s body fell forward, crumpling like paper within itself. Ben flinched, rubbing and grinding his forearms together behind his back, they quivered and shaky breath embodied his lungs. Gentle sobs reverberated around the room; their own thoughts destroying themselves. Ben concealed the emotion written in the lines of his forehead, hiding what even the swift batting of his eyes could not contain in tears that rained from his eyes and contaminated his cheeks. The silence was a killer as well. Andre appeared almost as a small child, his palms pressed into the spaces where his optics lay, the teardrops ran down and trailed off of his nose. In his own secrecy, Ben did not allow his scrutiny to fall to Hamilton--he couldn’t be seen like this.

         As much as it struck his tenderness and ripped from his soul, he wondered if Nathan let his emotions overcome him the night before destiny concealed rope around his neck. His throat dried, the very same neck in which Ben had written poems with his teeth on the tender skin. The abyss of his abdomen cracked, he was homesick for those bright sapphire eyes, homesick for _him_. Oh, loving him had led to the most exquisite form of self destruction. He met Nathan Hale in twisted fate and suddenly home was a person, not a place. Standing there with the miserable hint of existence colliding to pieces before his own witness. He felt the urge to lurch when he found that he would never know Nathan Hale’s last thought, utterly desensitized. They left his body swinging for several days after the execution.

           A pang in his chest, those blue eyes would never testify to the light again and Ben could never again flourish in the dips of sunshine hair around his fingertips or cry out from the impact of a nifty tongue between his legs. He discovered galaxies hidden behind his eyes when Nathan glared at him, he had beheld the humanization of the stars and wondered how often the moon asked to borrow the light from his eyes. He memorized every single constellation, inside he felt the universe dance throughout his bones and pulse throughout his veins. His mother told him not to make homes out of people, but he knew he belonged nestled deep in the corners of Nathan’s soul, breathing in his stars. Benjamin Tallmadge never got enough of Nathan Hale. That was the flaw, craving the honesty of his bare skin while they were his sweetest sin.

         Through the blurred vision and sorrow, Hamilton reached out an arm, planting a gentle, almost timid, embrace on Andre’s shoulder. “I’ll go ask Washington immediately,” Ben recognized the loss of confidence in his fiery inflection. The conventional inferno in his belly and passion sipping dew into every syllable--it was vacant from his speech. Hamilton’s grasp lapsed off of their joint and his boots creaked against the wood of the cabin. He shut the door softly behind him. There was the silence again, an emblem, a sanctity, solitude. The taciturnity funneled the weight, it begged to be understood. Ben believed that he was a scientist, listening with eager, fervent eyes into cosmos that have not had the chance to be named yet. The most depressive scene in the quietude was that it would never have a name. In a way, the candle shadows flickering against the wars told stories, and spoke for the both of them while they spoke of none. Their minds dancing alive to the symphonies in the black.

           By the time Hamilton had returned, viciously scrubbing his nails over the edges of his waistcoat, John had returned to his composure. “What did he say?”, a hint of anxiety tipping his lyrics.

           The aide-de-camp, tossed back his auburn hair ready to his command and zipped out his sentence. “The general readily gave his consent,” he paused, his lips then parting again to add, “he was moved by your request.” Even Tallmadge could sense that the immigrant was not complete. “You do understand why he will not see you?” he did not wait for a nod of completion, “He is torn over Benedict’s betrayal.” There was a singe but the accidental fault--a first name, it was a sign of decency that was not required. Ben was not there but he caught it in whispers in the campfire outside of his tent. When General Washington had heard of Arnold’s escape he had collapsed, Lafayette accompanied him back to his room but every officer at the scene caught the glisten on the general’s cheeks. “He pities you as much as the rest of us do," Ben turned his neck, his eyebrows arching against center of his forehead, his mouth became dry and he swallowed heavily. “I believe he is afraid that if he sees you he will not be able proceed forth with what is to be...”, he lapsed his speech, back again with the nervous tugging against his own sleeves. “You do understand don’t you?” his feet pivoted, “he is not a cruel man.” The glare of ice and the non existent sentiments of fury appeared to throw most off.

          John nodded slowly, his attention fully occupied. He was not picking absentmindedly at the dried wax caking the surface of the table, or tapping his feet to the surface of the floor. “I understand, will you thank him for me?” There was not a reply as Hamilton passed the redcoat a draft of parchment, a quill settled on the edge of the desk that John pulled closer to his reach as he moved his chair to write.

          It seemed as an eternity though it was barely an equivalent of five minutes before Major Andre passed the paper back and revolved his chair around to meet conversation again towards the boys of the continentals. Greyness covered the rows of soldier boys as they lay together in incoherent rows. A string of skeletons, their names etched in the book of sorrow, the book of death. Violence will be their last memory as they sleep a deadly peace. They won’t clear a space in the ancient yard of misery for the bodies, their souls wander the field of forgotten phantoms and bullet holes.

         Andre handed the unsealed letter back to Alexander, leaning back into the chair almost though he was comfortable. “Now I am at peace. There is nothing left for me to do. I can die with a clear mind. I only wish-”

         “What?”, both heads turned in the room. It was the first thing Ben had spoken to John Andre all evening. There was those fingers brushing against his hips again. The last man who laid hands on his hips was dead. Would he trail a finger down Alexander’s lips and wish he was in his place instead? It should of been him, and it would always need to be him. There was nothing but lifeless musing with glass eyes to the sky, fire of his hair sticking to his forehead.

         John sighed, his lashes fluttering across his cheeks before widening. “It is such a small thing. It shouldn’t make any difference, but it does. I know I must die, but I wish it could be a different way. A bullet through the heart, as a soldier, not hanging like a thief.”

           Ben’s chest grew stern and he cocked his head. He felt the wash of Alexander’s tidal eyes lap against his lateral but he did not look his way. There was a glance shared between one another, reserved and only Andre would bare witness when their shoulders met--reassurance from brother officers. Before Alexander’s speaking reputation got ahead of him, Ben stole the dialect, “You know the rules of war, the penalty of spying--”, his voice caught in his throat as if there was some invisible consequence to his syllables. The fear reached into the depths of his soul and rearranged the position of his bones, rebuilding his rib cage. Nathan had been so much like lightening, Ben an entire forest ready to collide and have the flames burnt off he best pieces of him. In the midst of potentials and blooming possibilities, Ben, for one, had never felt that kind of loneliness before. The howling intense feeling, itching to be interferred, and balanced in a pair of hands that wouldn’t not of judged the darkness.

          The warmth of the candle was almost Nathan’s gentle breath on the shell of his ear, the scratch of his coat were those teeth on his skin. The word love always caught in his thorax, stuck inside knocking on the door to his throat, inquiring politely if they could come out to play every time his back was slammed up a wall and his shirt slipped over his head. For those three words, he decided to take down the door and instead put up a window that he always left open for Nathan to peer through. There was the last night he saw his lover and even if he did say words as he always intended, Nathan knew that they were always there. Even this thought didn’t stop him from whispering them every night.

_Who could of known that last kiss would truly be the last?_

           The window at the end of the room faced the ghostly woods and scratching branches. Across the plaines and the rolling fields shadows were inching their way across the grass leaving obscurities of ash and illuminations from the moon. Benjamin Tallmadge was caught between a strong mind and a fragile heart. He remembered the night the moon dropped from the sky. They both ran through the woods to find where it lay. He was tripping on roots and slipping on snow, Nathan was holding his hand requesting him not to let go. When they found it, there was twigs in their hair, and rosette coloring lighting both their cheeks, frozen breath hanging in the air. The contentions to describe it got caught in both of their throats, its silver light danced through the thread of their coats, he had never seen such a view. Though while Nathan stared at the rising sun, Ben knew another moon, one far more alluring and luminous--his lover himself. The next morning, the stars folded into the moon, sinking off to the horizon and the sun rose just for them. Nathan always told him that if he could not recognize his self worth in any moment that galaxies have shifted just for a chance for him to breathe; so shine.

         Time hasn’t healed his pain, or quieted his fears. Every night, alone in his tent--he sheds silently those tears.

           _“If death steals me away without a proper goodbye, promise me this and promise me now: you will never forget the oceans that surged in my eyes.”_

          Ben wishes he had taken Nathan seriously that one time. _How could I?_ Ben saw them everywhere. From the chaos of his soul there flowed beauty. He fell asleep naked each night, wearing nothing but the ghost of their touch. The tears, idle tears, he knew not what they meant only knowing they fell from his cheeks with the weight of Nathan’s deathly embrace. Of course, with that shimmer, the blue eyed grace of fortune would promise to save him when he could not stay afloat, his tears would fill up an ocean, somehow--they’d built a boat. There was that emotion that culminated in his eyelids and spilled across his cheeks as waterfalls preform. Ben wished for a finger underneath his bags to brush them away and in a tragic moment the shadow of the tree branches on the war bitten meadow scratched their nails across his cheeks and drew blood from the flesh. For a second, he felt the closest thing to his lover's hand sliding across his jaw or edge of his thumb brushing away the hint of pain.

          Their love was a candle, glowing in the dark and a hint of warm sparks from the tiny flicker. His love were two candles, one that had gone out while the flame of the other never dies. They both were candles who burnt themselves to give each other light. The dark shade was not really shade at all, but rather the absence of light and all the flaws were not really flaws after all, rather they were the absence of his lover. _Nathan Hale_. The tears that soaked his cheeks reminded him of emotion, reminded him he was still capable of feeling something. What would Nathan think of him now? His back was now turned away from Hamilton and Andre and in the silence there was no conversation. The quiet was unnecessary to be filled, in result it lingered. Above his head, filling in lungs in every penetrating breath with bones rattling in his chest through the silent sobs. Benjamin never wanted to experience the pain of death, Nathan was now gone and the pain of living was far worse. Andre somehow knew Tallmadge wasn’t gazing out at the view, a cast out that would only remind him of an illness that had swallowed up his existence. 

           “He’s thinking of his friend, isn’t he?”, Andre had asked for something that they could not give him.

           Hamilton glanced to Tallmadge in the corner, pupils catching on the curls spiraling down the man’s back. He tugged on the chair next to Andre, seating himself down. Tallmadge did not follow away to them. “Hale?”, his voice grew pitches lower and Andre’s mouth pursed firmly, concern tightening at the corners, “Probably. He never mentions him, it’s too painful, I think.” Alexander leaned a chin forward on the chair in rest. “I know that he thinks of him often, I can always tell.”

          The Englishman’s eyebrows arched, meeting at the center of his forehead, “How so?”

          “The silence.”

          Ben had been taught what it is like to desire someone so incessantly that it hurt; he had learned  what it’s like to love someone so much it was damaging. The brutal fatality of it all was he knew what it was like to miss another with so much lust that it was agonizing. The harrowing must go unnoticed.

         Andre shifted in his chair, leaning closer, “Did you know Hale too?”

         Hamilton shook his heads, locks of his scarlet hair unraveling from behind his ears. “Not particularly.” Tallmadge and Hale were inseparable. “I would see him around camp, I never did speak with him.”  Slurring carols around a campfire, Tallmadge and Hale were so close their knees knocked together and every time one leaned over the other had to grasp the other's arm as so he would not fall over. Fire churned like melted gold in both their eyes, when one would turn the one direction the other would simply stare. They both walked the earth with purpose in their eyes and the lingering touch overlooked by many were caught by him when the flask passed the soldiers. Maybe it was just the heat of the fire illuminated on their cheeks, _it was always something more._ “I saw him kick a ball over the tops of the trees once, but I'd never spoken to him.”

            Alexander swallowed thickly, adams apple bobbing in the column of his throat. “I didn’t know much about him until the British Officer came under a flag of truce,” the volume of his voice was hardly above a scarce whisper.

            Watching Tallmadge stalk in the corner with his back turned from his frontal; Andre looked exhausted. His eyelids became heavy, “British officer?”, a sleepy voice.

           Hamilton did not hesitate, “He said his name was Montresor, and aide for General Howe said he.”

          “Montresor!” John exclaimed, perking up his features and beaming slightly, “I knew him! We served together under Howe.” His shoulders fell once more, “He was a good friend." 

            Instantaneously noticing the afflicting coals that cooked in his spirit, “He seemed a good man.” His fingers began twisted the threads becoming undone at the ends of his sleeves, a few spots of dried blood. “I was sent to speak to him, about--I do not remember," he rubbed his forehead, "An exchange of prisoners of war, perhaps.” The light hearted mood that had enveloped the space between the two now was abandoned and the calm creeped in. It sunk in his skin, riveting in his stomach, “He really wanted to talk about an American spy they had caught the day before.” From the wall, Ben's head fell forward slowly and he felt a small hole forming at the center of his ribs. It was collapsing his chest in within himself, knowing that underneath his coat, underneath in uniform there was a dark hole of quicksand swallowing in himself inside out. “Montresor befriended him in the last moments of his life.” Ben's reflection stained the mirror in his despair. For a moment, Alexander paused until his gaze fell across the room towards Benjamin Tallmadge, his white knuckles leaning against the frame. “ _He’ll_ always be grateful for that”. There was no gesture, no point or flicker of the wrist--they both knew it was Ben who he was speaking of. He hadn’t moved from the spot where he had consecrated himself.

            Alexander appeared surprised when a minuet contributed to the glisten on John’s visage, “I believe you have repaid the debt for myself.”

           The wax from the candle formed a drying pool of ruby on the wood of the desk. “Montresor told me of the stirring speech that Hale gave,” he respired, ingrained into his brain and tattooed onto Benjamin’s palm whenever he wrote  like filth. “It is possible for a man to die well, even on the gallows.” If a common man was haunted with the fact that the left Hale’s body swinging for several days at the site, how could Ben imagine it? “You have to believe that, Andre.”

            It haunted his impressions. Ben buried his worries beneath the cold earth, hoping they would not rise up to haunt him. Every night they still found their way to his cot, dragging him to a dismal place, nails ripping the surface of the earth, underneath the world where his dreams cannot deliver and demons taunt him as they played twisted games with his soul. He yearned to leave his memories, yet, they continued to follow him as he walked towards the future. Sooty reflections of a different time, his dreams spent their days in a cage, the man with the key was deceased. From the window, night sunk into his spirit, wind blowing through him, he stood over a grave filled with the memories they both shared. Ben was haunted by a ghost that only he could see.

         John’s stomach hurt. He wished he could believe it.

         “Listen,” Hamilton went on, “Why don’t you write him a note to General Washington? Tell him your wish, I’ll take it to him.”

            For just an instant, John Andre saw an ounce of promise in Lieutenant-Colonel Hamilton. It didn’t weigh enough. Prayers recollected themselves in his brain. “Do you think he’ll grant it?”, _he will not._

              Alexander chewed at his inner cheek as if the growth of a negative answer was pulsating in his throat. “I don’t know,” his voice grew mute and his chin tipped forward, chest closer forward than his heart--hope sweltering there. “Legally, he may not have a choice,” the flame from the sole burning candle lit the firewoods and illuminated his ambition.

          John swiveled in his chair, turning towards the chair and picking the quill up again into his hand. He licked his fingers before pulling out another piece of parchment from the stack, skipping a few pages with running waxy on the surface. He was holding his breath, the inside of his lungs searing and engraving deeper into his heart.

            _I trust that the request I make of your Excellency, which is to soften my last moments, will not be rejected. Sympathy towards a soldier will surely induce your Excellency to adapt the mode of death to the feelings of a man of honor. Let me hope, sir, that if my misfortune marks me as the victim of policy and not of resentment, I shall be informed that I am not to die on a gibbet._

         He sealed the letter, leaving mixed impresses of his lips from his fingers onto the ink like lovers luck before handing it to Hamilton. The freckles dotting his cheeks faded as the brim of his coat slid a shadow across his face. The immigrant recessed before with cautious idolizations, grabbed the letter. He nodded before swinging his hips down the steps. Alexander Hamilton was gone again. Again, Andre’s gaze caught on the side of Tallmadge’s stance, seeing the words that were crammed in his pockets. There was silence between a duo in a duet in this weakness. Surely the strength comes from unspoken altercations filling the room to the brim, _we both know how to swim_. Fractals of time that he had allowed himself to understand Benjamin Tallmadge and the redcoat was already stumbling, falling for the silence. They kept things hidden in his eyes, like the crack of a door.

            Ben can still recall the hot summer night where he sat by the lake, beads of water clinging to his naked skin while a full moon rose in the shadows of swaying trees. It was comical as he attempted to point out Venus with Nathan’s head resting on his shoulder. Whispered words, a love story written in the stars spelling out verses; tragic how it never told the ending.

_“When you look into my eyes, what do they tell you?”_

_“I’m obsessed with you. Utterly, willingly, and wonderfully so.”_

_How could people be poetry when they were not made of words?_

          “You seem to of taken a leave of absence although you have not left the room.” Tallmadge shook the past conversations from his head, sprinkling out of his hair onto the floor. He turned, facing Andre, rubbing his hands together in front his stomach, the ink of _his_ final words curved into his skin. An amusing glint flashed over the one who was destined to die, the corner of his lips turning up into a slight smirk. It was not taunting.

            Ben was too tired to try, “Past conflictions come back to speak to some of us.”

           Andre swerved in his seat, the gentleman in the corner’s gaze downed to the floorboards and a glance of desperation curled in nasty wrinkles at the corners of his eyelids. “I know he hurts you so.” Ben swallowed, biting at his own flesh, “Would you tell a dying man about him?”

          The physique of cropped lemon hair and startling admiral eyes danced at the other end of the room casting him a teasing simper. Without inspection he found the colors to paint them where the world had left him gray. He hesitated for a moment, in these seconds he forgot that he was gone. “He was witty, we graduated Yale the same class--I was always smarter”, the crinkles on his skin lifted in a sad smile, “he was quicker than I’ll ever be," chuckle released, “always the better poet, too." There were Nathan’s creations still stuck in his ears like water, blurring his hearing to where he couldn’t hear anything ever nearly beautiful. Ben trailed the room, drawing closer to where Andre was sat listening with eager ears and fluttering eyes. “Nathan always did agree I was the better actor," there was an erasable smile patterning across his cheeks and he sat in the seat where Hamilton once had. The image of fake powdered wigs and oily lipstick smeared across his lips, the taller drawing a nail underneath his chin to fix the smudges. “I don’t know why he teased me so for my height, I was only an inch shorter than him," his head shook and Andre cocked his head, blinking with a fixation of amusement playing on his visage. “His hair, _oh_ , it was the color of melted gold," it singed Ben’s skin when he drifted his nails up to root through their hair. “Leaning into the afternoons beside him, I’d always cast my eyes as sad nets towards his oceanic eyes." His shoulders flattened again, the grin disappeared and vision fell to the ground. “You do recall the legend of Pythias and Damon?”

           Andre knew the answer, memorized every tale. “Pythias faced execution and to the amazement of Dionysius, who because of the sincere trust and love in his friendship exhibited in his friendship with Damon, then lets both Damon and Pythias go free,” he narrated briefly. 

          “They were willing to die for one another,” Ben paused. His eyes went up, met the one before him and his lips quivered with something personal. “Do you know what it is like to will yourself to die for another?” Andre demolished, tilting his chin and allowing a gentle nod to posses his neck. Ben murmured his stellar to drift, lacing across his palm, tuning his chin to follow the smoke peeling into the air in tiny silver gusts into the air. “I was Damon.”

         John filled in the clues, “He, Pythias?”

         Tallmadge bowed, “We were willing to die for one another.” If death came for those who loved someone to hard, Ben was ready for death at Nathan’s first smile. There was no gleeful remembrance as there was before. There was no exuberance circulating in his mid and he burnt holes in his eyes from staring at that candle flickering in its place; so much life for hardly ever a movement. “I believe I was one of the first who could truly read the lines in his face”, he had a dimple on his cheekbone and a singular powder-burn scar on his clear skin across his forehead. There was a pained expression in his eyes, as if choking on guilt, pain and the will to break. “Yet, I’m the reason he cannot be here today.”

            “Tallmadge, how so?”

             The caress of his hand and extensions to his fingers led to white knuckled curling and nail marks indented into his skin. “I convinced him to enlist,” the fire wavered for a second, glowing low against the tar charring of the wick. “I wasn’t there to help him--what a lousy Damon I must be," anger pierced in every little word, forming sentences like sharps of mental tin that cut against the roof of his mouth. There were those malicious tears that crept into the brims of his eyelids that Andre noticed even as Tallmadge was not looking his way. “It is my fault,” his chest quivered and cheek bones hovered, “he should of died as a soldier and not as a spy”. Tallmadge sucked in his shaky breath, “I do not wish anything more desperately than to of been able to hold him as he...”

          There were more tears now that slipped down his cheeks and he lowered his head, fingers pressing against his jaw. He remembered crying over him, never just a few drizzles it was an entire storm on his cheeks. At the end of the day, he traced the places on the folds of his skin where their memories left footprints on his sheath and the shake of his touch stained his desire. Ben leaned forward, holding his fists into his chest and dragging nails across his stomach like daggers, Nathan left butterflies in his stomach that whistled like roses. Their corpses route in the pit and their wings ceased flight from their paper crumpled wings. His voice wavered as he struggled for breath and felt himself dipping beneath the pearling waves, “I once made him promise that if I fell that last thing I would see were the oceans of his eyes from where I once swam for hours.” He was drowning. “He made me promise to allow him to get lost in the forests of my eyes one last time.” Ben lifted his head to meet the arm that had crept its way to his shoulder. “Where was I then?", his voice broke and the violent quivering in his hands added to it. Softly, he spoke in a brief moment of clarity, "There is a certain pain in living when the purpose died inside your heart.”

             Through it all, Andre knew what it was like to have too many compilations caught in your throat that needed to be released, “It was not your fault.”

             The silent sobs riveted through his chest and pierced scars of acid on the exterior in the filth. _If Nathan was my tomorrow, where was my next day?_ He never gained his composure, head carving forward as tears consecrated themselves onto the wooden floorboards of the cabin prison. It was the haunt of Nathan, there was not one thing scary about him. What truly taunted Benjamin Tallmadge was the heart wrenching fear that he would never make sense to another human being. He spent so long with his face in his lover’s chest that his own heart beat matched in tune to their every vacant pulsation.

         “Did you love him?”

          The question caught him off guard. Ben halted, frozen over, lifting his nose with red impressed underneath his eyelids, consequences drifting in the atmosphere like snowflakes, fragile and full of little life. “I was drunk on the way he made me feel, how he drunk life into a gray world with his lips and every breath he breathed. I am sober now,” Benjamin blinked slowly, “Perhaps I was swimming for so long in his eyes that I don’t quite understand what it is like to walk anymore.” The sunshine figure at the end of the room danced a final silhouette and burst into the sun, their eyes in the water spilled across the floor to formulate seas. 

          Benjamin Tallmadge was lost describing every little beauty of Nathan Hale, bringing shame to the artistry John Andre thought he had written in James Rivington's paper. Ben had lived in a heart shaped house that whose uninhabited walls had rotten up.

           “Did Washington know your Hale as well?”

          It was long moment before Ben replied, “They met when Washington sent him on his mission. Tent him so unprepared: no codes, no ink, just simple notes in Latin. As though the British officers couldn’t read Latin!”

           _He was only twenty one._

          “Hamilton is right, Andre,” Tallmadge carried on, “It is not always dishonorable."

           “Spying? Dying on a gibbet?”, Andre remarked gingerly.

            A smile tormented his lips over the misery, “I may have risked it a few times myself. In your place, I should comfort myself that I would be giving my life for my country. Why suffer miserably over details?”

              John rocked his head. He could not understand American version of morality. “Do you not understand gentleman’s honor?”

           Ben blinked, chewing on his lips, “There is freedom waiting for you out there, Andre; you’ll be able to float on all the breezes of the sky.”

           “What if I fall?”

              “Oh, John, what if you fly?”

           John Andre always wanted to soar. They took confirmation, consolidation and collided into fireworks in his mind. Flickering candles died a thousand deaths before dawn. John would die after one. Through the pain that had engulfed in Benjamin Tallmadge's eyes, John Andre took solace into the forests that lay concealed beneath the locked doors. The trees spoke to him of too many tales, all involved two souls. 

          Tallmadge and Hale. 

**Author's Note:**

> Tell me what you thought! My Tumblr is @sonofhistory and if you have any historical questions based on this- just comment or hit me up on my blog.


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